Tag Archives: wednesday geek woman

This is a guest post by Laura James, an engineer based in Cambridge UK, and the founder of Makespace, a non-profit building a community workshop where you’ll be able to build or fix almost anything. This post appeared on her blog for Ada Lovelace Day 2011.

This year, I’m going with a topical woman in technology from the lovely DevChix community. I’m not sure if she’d want to be named; but she stood up and asked for an apology after a male speaker made a sexist joke at a major tech conference (JavaOne) recently. She also made sure the organisers heard about it, and they apologised and will follow up with the speaker’s company.Â But in some quarters she’s been criticised for making men in the audience uncomfortable – but she’s still an inspiration.

It’s depressing that these things are still happening (and that the joke reportedly got a good laugh). But raising awareness helps others understand that such incidents are offputting to women in technology The lovely ladies at GeekFeminism provide great resources – they too should be celebrated today.

This is a guest post by Cecilia Vargas, a former software developer and educator, who wants to create a women-only physical space where women can learn about and tinker with computer stuff

Zaha Hadid by Paco CT CC BY-NC-SA

Zaha Hadid is an acclaimed and controversial Iraqi-British architect. Zaha Hadid inspires me because she has thrived in a macho profession, and not only is she a woman, but is also non-Caucasian, like me. Her high-achiever father fed her single mind and strong will, and this reminds me of the encouragement I got from my Dad to go into STEM.

Hadid leads a successful London firm, and she has recently won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize, for a second time. She was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, the Nobel prize of architecture. The London Times describes out-of-the-box Hadid as an architect who has built a reputation for controversy.

Bergisel Schanze, Innsbruck, Austria, designed by Zaha Hadid

Her critics call her diva, and as reply, the T-shirts worn by Hadid staff at the opening of her first major public building, the Cincinnati Art Center, in 2003 read “Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?”

Denise is also an author, published under ‘Denise McCune’ in the Finding the Way and Changing the World collections of Valdemar stories, and an artisan, whose jewelry and stitch markers can be found at the Faultless Pajama Foundry on Etsy.

I first heard of Jill Bolte Taylor as a result of watching the free entertainment (which happened to be TED talks) on a Virgin Flight. I was rivited by her story. She recounts her experiences including the moment where she realizes she was having a stroke (10:35 mark):

“Oh my gosh! I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke! Wow! This is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out? But, I’m a very busy woman! I don’t have time for a stroke!”

Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk, by Steve Jurvetson

Jill is an inspiration to me in so many ways. While still recovering her memories she taught a highly technical class. She stayed just ahead of the students in learning the material. Amazing!

If you haven’t heard of Jill, check out her TED talk where she recounts the morning of the stroke and it’s aftermath. She also spreads a wonderful message of letting go and living in the moment… she asks that we “Step to the Right” of our left hemisphere brain chatter – a reference to the profound peace and nirvana she experienced as she lost the function of the left half of her brain.

Maud Menten was one of the first Canadian women to receive a medical doctorate, in 1911. Women could not do research in Canada in those days, so she sailed alone across the Atlantic to work at Leonor Michaelis’ lab in Berlin. During her year there, they developed the first model and equation to describe enzyme kinetics, the Michaelis-Menten equation. She worked for many years as a teacher and researcher at Pittsburg, making more important discoveries – she was the first to separate proteins by electrophoresis, and altogether, could lay claim to being the mother of biochemistry.

She was hard-working, determined and persistent, despite lack of recognition – her contributions to medical science exceed that of many Nobel laureates, and she was only made full professor a year before she retired. She also studied languages, music and painting, and did mountaineering. Today, she is surprisingly unknown, even by biochemists (I learnt the Michaelis-Menten equation early in my undergraduate biochemistry courses but only found out that Menten was a women significantly later), and I’d like to rectify that a bit.

Marie Curie was by then very famous, having won two Nobel Prizes. Curie liked her work so much that she gave her one of her most interesting research projects to do, and wrote a letter to the Portuguese government asking them to renew her research grant.

Unfortunately the combination of Marques being a woman, and the Portuguese government being in a state of flux (transforming from military to civilian dictatorship) meant that her grant wasn’t renewed. Curie managed to finagle a continuing scholarship for her anyway, and her doctorate on “new research on the fragmentation of barium salts” was awarded with the highest possible rating of tres honorable. In 1936, the Portuguese Universities recognized the degree, and awarded her an equivalent doctorate.

On returning home, however, she was unable to get an appropriate post at University. This, from all my sources, does appear to be fairly simple sexism, even if the lack of financial support in France might not have been. Instead, she lectured and started up the Laboratory of Radiochemistry and only in 1942 was she awarded the title of First Assistant, which meant that the University was recognizing her contribution more significantly.

She continued to lecture and work towards building up a new department, which eventually became the Department of Radiochemistry and Nuclear Chemistry. She published regularly throughout her professional life, researching many aspects of peaceful application of nuclear technology. In 1966, her contributions were finally recognized with a full professorship at the University of Lisbon.

She died in 1986, at the age of 87.

This post is based on Portuguese language sources (linked below) so anyone who can read the original Portuguese, please feel free to comment if my interpretations were wrong!

Born in 1917, Annette Laming-Emperaire was a graduate student at the Sorbonne when she began to study Paleolithic cave paintings (like this one from Lascaux.)

Although during her life her brilliance was always apparent, her great originality seems to have burst into being like a fire. La significationÂ turned out to be that most rare beast, a graduate thesis that changed an entire discipline.

In this thesis, which became a 1962 book, Laming-Emperaire summarized the discovery of Paleolithic art and the methods proposed so far for dating it. Then she looked at various interpretations of the art that scholars had suggested over the years: that the paintings evoked hunting magic; that they were fertility symbols; that they represented the totems of tribes.

Then she dismissed it all.

All of this, the whole body of work dedicated to explaining cave art, sixty years of consistent effort by many brilliant minds, she sweeps aside.

For Laming-Emperaire, all the research that had come before her – all of it – was fatally flawed because it depended on ethnography…. Laming-Emperaire said researchers “indiscriminately invoke facts from some societies that, by their social, religious or economic structure, can be very different from prehistoric societies – about which we know practically nothing in any case – and that are often very different among themselves.”

Laming-Emperaire went further. Such comparisons, she said, are inherently arbitrary. An archaeologist forms a hypothesis about an artifact, then trawls the monographs of ethnology for evidence that supports his view. Confirmation bias might as well be built into the process.

What, then, are our options? If we can’t use arguments from existing cultures to shed light on cave paintings, how else might we bring the Paleolithic painters back to life? As Laming-Emperaire saw it, our options exist on a spectrum between rigorous empiricism – exact and objective enumeration of places, shapes and sizes – and prehistorical fiction – just making stuff up. The discipline, she said, had been oscillating between these poles: “sclerotic rigor on one side, a lively but unreliable creation on the other.” In the rest of La signification,Â she tried to show another way forward.

We can know only three things (she argued) about a prehistoric artifact: how it was made; any signs of use; and where it was found. The methods of painting cave art are interesting, but they don’t shed much light on what the paintings mean. Nor is it helpful to look for signs of use, since in the vast majority of cases there simply aren’t any.

What she proposed, instead, was to look at where the paintings are. Instead of allowing our preconceptions and prejudices to blind us, Laming-Emperaire called us to pay attention to what is in front of our eyes. She drew diagrams of the cave walls illustrating what species were represented and which way they faced. By carefully inventorying each scene, she began to identify paintings that might represent the same scene: a bison in a trap, surrounded by horses; a man threatened by a bison.

If she is right, these scenes are the oldest messages in human history, communicating across tens of millennia. And this hypothesis is based not upon idle speculation, but upon rigorous scholarship. Not surprisingly, Laming-Emperaire’s own legacy changed archeology, and her influence endures.

This audacious graduate student is saying it’s time to leave the thinking and the methods of the past behind and march in the manner she prescribes into the future.

And, broadly speaking, that is exactly what happened. The goals and expectations are rather different, and the techniques, particularly those using computer graphics, are more sophisticated, but detailed inventories and comparisons like those she first suggested remain at the heart of the study of Paleolithic art.

Our Wednesday Geek Woman series of profiles has been on partial hiatus for half a year or so, but we’d like to have a run of profiles leading up to Ada Lovelace Day on the 7th October. Depending on submission volume it may also run as a regular feature again.

Wednesday Geek Woman is like Ada Lovelace Day only throughout the year. Most of our submissions are by guest posters, and these posts allow you to submit entries to the series.

Submit your profile of a geek woman in (hidden) comments here and selected ones will be posted (perhaps lightly edited) on Wednesdays. Here’s what to include:

multiple submissions by the same person are fine, so if you’ve submitted before, or you’ve already submitted this time, no problem!

famous geek women: no geek woman is too well-known for this series unless we’ve featured her before. If more than one person submits the same woman to this round, their profiles will be combined.

living women

historical women

women who use pseudonyms

profiles you’ve published elsewhere (as long as you kept the right to allow us to republish it), for example, an Ada Lovelace Day post you made in previous years. If your piece has appeared at another URL, please give us that URL.

We may not publish your profile if it falls into these categories:

there are lots of geek women past and present, so for now we will not be re-posting a woman subject who has already been featured. See previously posted women. (Exception: if the woman was featured as part of a group profile, an individual profile is fine.)

profiles of women, especially living women, who don’t have some kind of public profile, which might include things like a public blog, a professional homepage with a professional bio, an academic homepage listing her publications, a Wikipedia page with her biography. It’s fine if she’s not famous, but we don’t want to highlight someone who’d rather not have a Web presence at all.

profiles of fictional women

per How Not to Do Ada Lovelace Day, profiles of women focussed on them being a supportive life-helper to a man geek will not be accepted (collaborative geeking with men of course accepted)

this really shouldn’t need to be said, but your post should be about the woman’s geeking, not about her appearance or personal life

In the absence of doctors’ records, it can never be known how many babies died in the U.S. because of thalidomide’s “clinical trials”; Dr. Lenz estimated that in forty percent of cases where there was fetal exposure, the infant died in its first year. Eleven women (or perhaps more) gave birth to thalidomide babies in the U.S., but there may have been many more whose parents never discovered that their children’s malformations were caused by Kevadon. It is unbearable to speculate upon how many more might have been born but for the singular obduracy of Frances Kelsey.

This is the story of a woman who saved countless lives and protected any number of babies from grievous harm, using nothing but science and her own strength of character.

Born Frances Kathleen Oldham on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, she studied at McGill before moving to the new Pharmacology department at the University of Chicago (which accepted her on the assumption that she was a man.) At Chicago she developed an interest in teratogens and earned her Ph.D. and M.D. She also met and married Dr. F. Ellis Kelsey. When he was appointed special assistant to the surgeon general, the Kelseys moved to Washington, D.C.

Frances Kelsey worked for the AMA reading doctors’ testimonials for various drugs, and she and her colleagues could soon detect among them the well-paid hacks for Big Pharma. It turned out to be excellent training for her appointment in 1960 to the Food and Drug Administration as one of only seven full-time and four part-time physicians reviewing applications to approve new drugs.

A week after she reported for work, the application for thalidomide landed on her desk. Her first assignment! The drug had already been approved in Canada and more than 20 countries in Europe and Africa. Another person might have rubber-stamped it. Kelsey did not.

The first thing Kelsey noticed as she examined the four-volume application from Richardson-Merrell was the names of the doctors – including that of Dr. Ray Nulsen of Cincinnati, Ohio – whose testimonials were included with the application: many were the same hacks she remembered from her time at the AMA… the mere presence of those names did not bode well for the application in Frances Kelsey’s eyes. In fact, as she looked through the application, she found it wanting in many respects.

The chronic toxicity studies had not run for long enough. There wasn’t enough data about absorption and excretion. The animal studies and clinical trials were not detailed enough and there wasn’t enough documentation. What documentation there was, was troubling. Humans responded to thalidomide by lapsing into a deep sleep, but rats did not. Worse, no lethal dose could be found for rats. That made it possible that rats weren’t absorbing the drug at all, while humans were. If that were the case, the animal studies shed no light on possible toxicity to humans.

Despite all this, Kelsey had no grounds for rejecting the application. Instead, she told the company she needed more and better data before she could take any action. In fact, she stalled. She declared the application incomplete and thus ineligible for submission fifty-eight days after it was submitted. That meant it would have to be resubmitted, giving her an extra sixty days to think about it.

You can imagine how much this delighted the pharmaceutical company.

But when Richardson-Merrell pressured her, the medical officer did not budge.

Richardson-Merrell subjected Kelsey to a withering siege of professional aggravation, provocation and intimidation. Altogether she chronicled fifty-one exchanges with the company, when there should have been none.

The company’s scientific officer, Dr. F. Joseph Murray, got her name and phone number (which he shouldn’t have had) and bombarded her with calls. What data did she need? How could the patient instructions be reworded? Could he submit revisions casually, over the phone (thus leaving no paper trail)? How about if he shared data with her privately, rather than in the formal application?

Kelsey rejected the second application as incomplete.

In February, 1961, Kelsey read the first reports of thalidomide causing peripheral neuropathy in the British Medical Journal.Â She challenged Murray with it. He admitted that Richardson-Merrell had known of the reports, and offered to add a warning to the drug’s packet insert. No dice. Despite the nerve damage issue, Richardson-Merrell wanted to declare the drug safe for use in pregnancy.Â But, Kelsey argued, if thalidomide could cause nerve damage in adults, how could the company prove that it would not cross the placental barrier and cause even worse damage to a fetus?

Testing this would take years and cost untold money. Richardson-Merrell was disinclined.

Kelsey required the company to resubmit the application six times. Richardson-Merrell tried to go over her head, but she stood her ground.

On November 18, 1961, the first statements came out of Germany about birth defects attributable to thalidomide. On November 29, the drug was removed from the German market.

On March 8, 1962, Richardson-Merrell withdrew its application.

On August 8, President Kennedy gave Frances Oldham Kelsey the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest honour given to a civilian. As well he might. At least 4000 children in Europe were born affected by the drug. Kelsey’s rigour averted a similar tragedy in the USA.

Dr. Kelsey’s contribution,

wrote Senator Carey Kefauver,

flows from a rare combination of factors: a knowledge of medicine, a knowledge of pharmacology, a keen intellect and inquiring mind, the imagination to connect apparently isolated bits of information, and the strength of character to resist strong pressures.

Anyone for a Geek Feminist manifesto?

She became an American hero, gracing the cover of LifeÂ magazine, receiving and answering hundreds of letters, and then quietly returning to her job of protecting the public’s health.